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Me and I Are Not Friends, Just Acquaintances: on Thought Insertion and Self-Awareness

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Abstract

A group of philosophers suggests that a sense of mineness intrinsically contained in the phenomenal structure of all conscious experiences is a necessary condition for a subject to become aware of himself as the subject of his experiences i.e. self-awareness. On this view, consciousness necessarily entails phenomenal self-awareness. This paper argues that cases of delusions of thought insertion undermine this claim and that such a phenomenal feature plays little role in accounting for the most minimal type of self-awareness entailed by phenomenal consciousness. First, I clarify the main view endorsing this claim i.e. the Self-Presentational View of Consciousness and formulate the challenge from thought insertion. After, I offer a systematic evaluation of all the strategies used by the advocates of this view to deal with this challenge. Finally, I conclude that most of these strategies are unsatisfactory for they rest in unwarranted premises, imprecisions about the agentive nature of cognitive experiences, and especially, lack of distinction between the different ways in which subjects can become aware of their own thoughts.

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Notes

  1. It is important to note that a number of authors have disputed this idea (Dainton 2004; Schear 2009; López-Silva 2014; Lane 2015; Howell and Thompson 2017; Guillot 2017). A further issue here has to do with the question about whether cognitive states such as beliefs and thoughts enjoy phenomenal character at all (Bayne and Montague 2011). In this paper, I will assume that cognitive states enjoy some form of phenomenal character.

  2. For a helpful summary of this debate, see Howell and Thompson (2017).

  3. This term has received different names in the literature: ‘sense of mineness’ (Zahavi 2005b); ‘for-me-ness’ (Zahavi 1999); ‘my-ness’ (Frith 1992), and ‘meishness’ (Billon 2013). Zahavi (2005a, 2011) and Grünbaum and Zahavi (2013) use the terms ‘mineness’ and ‘ownership’ interchangeably.

  4. The term ‘intrinsic’ is explicitly meant to distinguish Zahavi’s view from higher-order theories of self-consciousness (Zahavi 2011, p. 57, note 1).

  5. By the SPV, I refer to the view defended by Dan Zahavi and summarized in ‘Subjectivity and Selfhood’ (2005a). Other subjectivity theories are ‘higher-order theories of consciousness’ (Rosenthal 1997; Flanagan 1992), and Kriegel’s (2009) ‘Self-Representational Theory’. A careful examination of the SPV view seems fairly justified in light of its current influence in disciplines such as psychopathology and psychiatric diagnosis (Parnas et al. 2005), philosophy of mind and cognitive sciences (Gallagher and Zahavi 2008), and developmental psychology research (Zahavi 2005a), just to name a few. It is important to note that no systematic evaluation of all the strategies used by the advocates of the SPV to deal with the challenge from thought insertion is found in current literature. Some authors have treated this issue tangentially and in less specific ways always as a part of broader discussions about the nature of phenomenal consciousness.

  6. Block (1995) formulates the concept of phenomenal consciousness as follows: ‘P-consciousness [phenomenal consciousness] is experience. P-conscious properties are experiential properties. P-conscious states are experiential, that is, a state is P-conscious if it has experiential properties’ (1995, p. 230).

  7. First, it is important to note that the authors use the terms ‘self-consciousness’ and ‘self-awareness’ interchangeably. Second, as the discussion goes on, I will show that such a view is populated by a number of conceptual and phenomenological confusions.

  8. It might be suggested that TI is a challenge for all subjectivity theories of consciousness. Although I agree with this claim, for the sake of specificity and clarity, here I shall examine only the way in which this phenomenon undermines Zahavi’s argumentation.

  9. This reply has been formulated in slightly different style in Zahavi (2005a, b), and Grünbaum and Zahavi (2013).

  10. Campbell (1999a, b) formulates the idea of agentive mineness in a top-down fashion, namely, as the product of a retrospective explanatory judgement about the occurrence of thoughts. On this view, there is no phenomenal sense of mental agency attached to the fundamental phenomenology of thoughts.

  11. Usually, the author equates the phenomenology of thoughts with the phenomenology of motor actions. Zahavi (2005a, p 143) claims that: ‘the sense of agency refers to the sense of being the author or source of an action or thought (Zahavi 2005a, p. 143, my emphasis).

  12. The authors attribute this idea to Campbell’s (Campbell 1999a, b) proposal. However, the idea of mineness defended by Campbell does not seem to be consistent with the one defended by the self-presentational approach. In fact, Campbell (1999a, b) claims something quite different: ‘What makes my occurrent thoughts mine is not just that they show up in my stream of consciousness. What makes them mine is, in addition, the fact that they are product of my long-standing beliefs and desires, and that the occurrent thinking can affect the underlying state’ (621).

  13. It is important to note that no-direct-access does not imply no-access at all.

  14. Independent evidence against the main claims of the SPV comes from the phenomenology of Cotard’s syndrome and depersonalization. These symptoms can be explained as experiences that retain for-me-ness but lack subjectivity and sense of mineness. For reasons of extension I cannot deal in depth with these cases, for a more specific treatment see: Billon (2016), and Guillot (2017).

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Acknowledgments

For helpful discussions, I’m very grateful to Rob Knowles, Leo Tarasov, Thomas Fuchs, Elisabeth Pacherie, Thomas Uebel, and Mauricio Otaíza. For all the time dedicated to improve my ideas, I especially thank to Joel Smith, Tim Bayne, and Tom McClelland. Preliminary versions of this paper were presented at the Universidad de Chile, University of Manchester, University of Salzburg, VU University of Amsterdam, and the New University of Lisbon. The title of this paper is inspired by the lyrics of the song Alone/With You by Daughter.

Funding

The final writing of this work was funded by the Project FONDECYT N° 11,160,544 ‘The Agentive Architecture of Human Thought’ granted by the National Commission for Scientific and Technological Research (CONICYT) of the Government of Chile.

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  1. School of Psychology, Faculty of Medicine, Universidad de Valparaíso, Chile. Av. Brasil, 2140, Valparaíso, Chile

    Pablo López-Silva

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Correspondence to Pablo López-Silva.

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López-Silva, P. Me and I Are Not Friends, Just Acquaintances: on Thought Insertion and Self-Awareness. Rev.Phil.Psych. 10, 319–335 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-017-0366-z

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